


Someone New

by spacejargon



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Humor, Light Romance, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-29
Updated: 2018-04-29
Packaged: 2019-04-29 11:11:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,857
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14471421
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/spacejargon/pseuds/spacejargon
Summary: Castiel's mind is a colorful, lyrically complicated place where not even Lucifer appreciates the noise.





	Someone New

“ _Don’t take this the wrong way...”_

Castiel’s mind finishes the sentence aloud.

‘ _You knew, who I was, with every step that I ran to you.’_

“Stop singing.” His own voice is grated and rough, swatting at himself mentally under a murmur of a breath. There’s two to tango and Castiel’s head is the sounding box of a radio with no power button. Lucifer despises it.

Castiel doesn’t hear him, because Castiel isn’t actually there. He’s tucked away in a far corner, locked out of his own eyes except for sometimes when the shutters to the windows flick open for just a peek out. Only when it’s sunshine and daisies, and nothing of the foul things his vessel goes through.

The wave of colors that mixes into his eyes every now and then is an annoying proof of life for Castiel, in his own head. Lucifer had known angels were annoying, but _this_ is starting to irritate him. Not even Sam was this annoying, and he was boring, to say the least.

Dean’s ears prick and he turns around, lips pursed into a frown. “Something you wanna say, Cas?” There’s a shotgun in his lap and his hand’s around the muzzle. “You haven’t said anything for a while. Angel radio?”

Castiel’s lips press into a thin line before he realizes what he’s doing and the expression quickly fades. “You could say that,” his voice catches over the cut of his throat running dry. His eyes flatten as he blinks, straightening his composure. “There is nothing of import.”

Dean raises a brow, shrugging when he turns back to cleaning the gun. Ammunition sits by him, rolled up against his leg. “Nothing? Do the angels just chat whenever they feel like it?”

The words keep slipping through, much to his annoyance. _“Only blue or black days—_ No. It’s echoes of their voices. Harder to block out without focusing on it.”

“Huh. Must be annoying.”

Lucifer rolls Castiel’s eyes. “You have no idea.”

Sam makes an appearance with a duffel bag and two beers. “Hey, Cas,” he calls to him with a nod, unknowingly causing the buzz of static translated into color before Lucifer gets another taste of angel radio.

‘“ _Come sit beside me, my only son,”’_ His teeth grind in his ears, guitar notes reverberating in his skull and his patience is wearing thing. Just thinking toward the source _stop singing and shut up already_ does little more than press against the confines of this vessel held together by Castiel. By taking up a vessel not made for him, he hadn’t taken the time to remember that with another angel present it’s not the same.

Clearly not, because the song keeps going in his head with all the details remembered, as if playing through muscle memory of the song itself in the midst of these two idiots preparing to hunt down a pack of werewolves.

‘” _And be a simple kind of man,”’_ The long, heartfelt notes wear on Lucifer’s patience every bit more with each second he spends silently repeating his gritted mantra: _shut up shut up shut up already._

Only he forgets for a second that he’s not speaking inside his head anymore and the realization comes with the raised brows of Dean, his shotgun abandoned at his side as his eyebrows rise to his hairline.

“You sure you’re doing okay, Cas?” He exchanges one of _those_ looks with Sam, who is as dull and blank as Lucifer remembers, having sunken into listlessness after Lucifer’s uneventful exit. He remembers every inch of Sam’s flesh with every mark, every scar, every little nook and cranny in his big, dull, _human_ brain.

Instead of dismissing their concerns, like he should have done, Lucifer hears one more line of a song and his patience is in tatters as he goes roaring to the back of Castiel’s head, hunting down the source while the vessel collapses in the lack of strings to keep it upright.

The feel of Castiel’s pressed lining against the seams of his meatsuit disappears in a hot rush, Lucifer’s cold claws sinking in sharply, trying to chase Castiel back into the corners of his mind.

“ _Would you_ quit _already!”_ Lucifer materializes in a room with the light of a flickering TV casting a faint glow over a world of gray. _“Enough!”_

Dean is off the bed in seconds as soon as Castiel’s eyes roll back and he drops like a stone. Sam is on him next, both of them rushing to meet Castiel but not in time to stop him from hitting the edge of the nightstand to his left.

“Cas!” Dean’s voice falls on deaf ears, Castiel unresponsive when he tries to shake him.

“ _I know you’re in here, Castiel,”_ Lucifer’s eyes wander the darkened box of where Castiel’s consciousness is the strongest. The lights of the TV have flickered off in response. _“Quit playing around and get out here. I’ve had enough of you.”_

“ _If that were true, you would have left my vessel by now.”_

Lucifer growls, inhaling sharply through his teeth with a venomous breath. _“Don’t be like that, Castiel. What’s it going to take to shut you up? I’m figuring since you haven’t learned how to shut off your stupid radio, you wanted me for something. So spit it out and go back to where I locked you away.”_

“ _You didn’t lock me anywhere,”_ Castiel’s voice rings in the expanding darkness, a flicker of his silhouette visible when Lucifer reaches for him. _“We had an agreement.”_

“ _So then what’s with the noise? Can’t you just can it?”_

Castiel’s voice fades away quickly, a _whooshing_  soundfilling his ears as Lucifer finds himself shoved back into the driver’s seat and Dean’s standing over him, his hands firmly gripping his shoulders and Sam staring down at him with a look of pity.

“Cas!” Dean is immediately aware when Lucifer rolls back into gear. He’s like a trigger-happy puppy, once his master has returned again. “Cas, are you okay? Seriously, if there’s something going on, you gotta let us know.”

“Yeah, Cas,” Sam adds, eying Castiel suspiciously, awash with a strangeness in his eyes Lucifer doesn’t miss. “This isn’t like you.”

“Just...” Lucifer shakes Castiel’s head, clearing his throat down another octave or two to play the part. “Just some interference. I’m fine.” He clamors to his bearings, shrugging Sam and Dean off with little to no effort, though Dean is harder to shake. Sam remains woefully unconvinced. “I’m fine.”

Dean gives a bullish snort. “‘Fine’ hardly cuts it. You passed out and now you’re saying you’re fine? Angels don’t just pass out.”

Lucifer grinds his teeth, irked at his insistence. “I experienced a minor failure in my vessel. The issue has been resolved.”

Sam opens his mouth to speak as the notes of another chord rattle in Lucifer’s ears, stirred into existence.

He recognizes them with a sting—the first notes of Clair de Lune thunder in his ears over the sound of Sam questioning what entails as ‘vessel failure’.

~

Packed into the back seat of the Impala is not the way Castiel—ahem, Lucifer, had wanted to go about things. But, in pretending to be the grandiose sense of _nothing_ that is Castiel, he had to play dumb to shake the Winchesters off his tail.

The first few minutes of driving go by in relative quiet. Sam talks about the case over news articles and Dean nods along, a question or two thrown back to Castiel and Lucifer answers with the lowest amount of commitment possible. No one suspects a thing.

Only when Dean pops a tape and turns up the volume does Lucifer experience another jarring shift, where the sounds of the song arise and ring in his hollowed bones.

The first notes come in that smug tone of a song that knows how annoying it is. How is that even possible? He’s always known humans were so arrogant, but what passes for entertainment in this culture, along with its performers, drives him—

“ _Crazy, crazy, I go crazy for you, baby,”_

Dean’s expression of surprise goes unnoticed by Castiel, similarly how he doesn’t notice Castiel’s calm facade melting with a hiss of steam. “When’d you get that one? That’s not from the 80s.”

Sam chuckles beside him. “Of course you’d notice. I picked it up the last time we were in Nashville, at that record shop. They had a couple tapes. Totally not your style, but it’s still rock.”

Huffing, Dean doesn’t turn off the tape though he reaches for the volume, deciding against it. “It’s ACDC, man,” he tuts, “you can’t go wrong with ACDC. Right, Cas?”

Lucifer’s blood is reaching a dangerous boiling point.

“Turn it off,” he grumbles, with a terse, low noise scraping up from his throat.

Dean’s eyes flick to the rearview mirror. “Sorry, what?”

It comes like a flash of lightning in blue skies—Castiel’s eyes change, shifting with a darkened look to his eyes as his voice conjures itself in a snarl. Electricity crackles in the form of static that reeks of ozone with a chemical burn.

“Turn it off!”

In an instant, the radio bursts in a flash of white and a puff of smoke as the music suddenly cuts. Dean swerves to the side of the road in shock as Sam jumps nearly straight out of his skin, the car coming to a sputtering halt when the music is finally cut and there’s no more singing but Lucifer’s ears are still pounding.

The first to speak is most obviously Dean, a righteous fury quickly building and breaking. “What the hell was that, Cas!?”

_Dad damn it._

A hand claws at his face, pressing into his eye and upper brow bone with a sharp dig of the meat of his palm. When he looks up at Dean who stares him down with a face of death, Castiel glares back. “I hate it.”

“...The radio?” Sam is going to be his undoing. He can just feel his artificial blood pressure rising in the confines of a hot, sweaty, _useless_ meatsuit. “You’ve never said anything about it before. What happened?”

Castiel’s voice comes in the same grave, bristled grumble. Inside his skull, he’s roaring with an intent to kill the stupid angel and his stupid music preferences. “I can’t concentrate.”

“And I can’t believe you just broke my radio! Cas, what the hell was that for!?” Dean is on him and refusing to let go, incensed with the smoke that rises in the place of the radio. He’s about a second away from opening the door and dragging Castiel out into the road, ending it in the way only his fantasies of spaghetti westerns will allow.

He can’t fly away. That would tip them off and stupid, stupid Castiel happens to have no wings so he’s stuck playing victim and for the love of Dad, would he love to crush Dean Winchester’s skull right now. “I’m sorry. I’ll fix it.”

His jaw tenses as the broken electrical cords rearrange themselves, the seared plastic and metal reworking into something new. Dean’s not forgiven him yet, with eyes boring through Castiel’s skull that Lucifer himself would taunt if he didn’t feel the need to kill a certain angel with the host of Heaven to watch. With a short sigh he exhales deeply, the radio fixing and the tape clicking out, as if it had never been touched before.

Dean stares and stares. If he did any longer Lucifer would snap off his stupid little head. “Dude, something is totally going on with you. And if we weren’t already running late, I’d drag you out of the car and make you tell us right now. But since we _are_ late, I’m not gonna bother.”

Lucifer closes his eyes, his head falling back against the seat. Sam murmurs something to Dean who mutters in return, turning his eyes back to the road and the car pulls back onto asphalt. The conversation between them sputters and dies, still spurned with suspicion.

Exhausted, Castiel’s lips pull into a tired almost-smile the rest of the way, silent save for when Dean turns up the radio and murmurs along to yet another rock song.

Lucifer screams from the inside all the way to Spartanburg, South Carolina.

~

There was a total of eight werewolves in a pocket of bar slums from one-night-stands turned vicious. Sam’s chasing down another lead, the elusive ninth one, excusing himself because he’s the only one not covered in blood when Dean tells him to go, clutching onto Castiel like a lifeline. The funniest part is that Lucifer can’t remember why Dean clings to him so tightly and hauls him into the car like it’s life or death.

“Shit, Cas,” Dean grunts, shoving Castiel into the car with little to no warning. After realizing what he’d done he’d made a noise like fear and concern, reeking of an adrenaline high wearing off and the earthy scent of werewolf blood. “What the hell is going on with you? Why is your mojo all whacked out?”

The silence resounding in Castiel’s head had caught him off guard the entire time. Not a single word nor utterance of anything remotely musical caught in the webbing of Lucifer’s growing irritation. Nothing pinpricked or poked or prodded at his eardrums with no obnoxious weave of colors to be translated into stupid song lyrics.

Castiel has been strangely silent. It’s a curse in disguise. Lucifer is slowly losing his mind.

“Cas? You with me, Cas?” Oh, that’s right—Castiel blinks into recognition. There’s blood coming from a wound on his stomach, clawed from his heart and down to the edge of his ribs. The rip and shred of flesh had summoned him from somewhere and he’d reacted violently, burning the light out of the werewolf’s eyes before he had realized what he had done.

Dean seems to understand the tumultuous string of consciousness. “Cas, buddy, you there? Don’t tell me you’re gonna turn into a werewolf.”

The angel blinks again, dark eyes disappearing and reappearing like clicks of one track being skipped to the next. “No,” he chokes out, uncertain of himself in every aspect as he pushes himself up, clutching a hand to the shreds of his flesh. “It’s nothing, Dean.”

The look in Dean’s eyes changes from concern and confusion to an uneven, rough mix like wet concrete. “You’re holding your guts in with your hand, Cas. Don’t tell me it’s nothing.” Dean slams the door shut behind him with a snarl of frustration, of anger. When the Impala roars to life, so does the track stuck in the music player.

Castiel forgot the name for it. It’s an interesting contraption—one of his favorites of the modern age.

As Dean starts driving, Castiel’s head falls to his shoulder. Dean doesn’t talk but his lips press in a thin line, swallowing thickly as Castiel’s fingers dig deep into the tatters of his side.

The world shifts into gray, turning behind his eyelids as Dean’s voice, true to Castiel’s finely-tuned hearing, slowly gains cohesion. There’s a tinge of nervousness to it, even as Castiel tries to think away the argument that he could be dying.

Of course he’s not. Dean knows better than to think that. It’s strange he still does, because a werewolf has no chance of killing an angel or an archangel in the skin of an angel. Castiel’s side burns and pulls with every unnecessary breath, but he doesn’t heal the wound. Not yet.

Dean’s cellphone goes off in the low rumble of another tape clicking into place. Dean checks it, holding it to his ear as he maneuvers with his other hand. “Better be good news, Sam.”

Sam’s voice filters through to Castiel’s ears, sure and sore but triumphant. _“Got the last one. How’s Cas?”_

Dean takes his eyes off the road, sliding them to Castiel. Castiel can feel the weight of his gaze. “Still breathing. See you at the motel, Sammy.”

The phone falls somewhere onto the seat or Castiel’s lap. Neither of which the angel is sure about, but he’s far more than certain he hears the same notes that have been playing in his head all day, and every day before then.

It’s been in his head since the first time he heard the song, on a beer run months ago with Dean whilst learning the nuances of what qualifies as a good taste in music.

Dean had picked this song and started humming along as Castiel was quiet, observing what defines the good and bad of music.

“ _Mama told me, when I was young,”_ Dean has a scratchy start, his throat dry and lacking any sort of warm-up when he crackles the words, out of tune. _“‘Come sit beside me, my only son...’”_

Cassette player. That’s what it’s called.

Dean pauses as the instrumental fills the silence, a hand slithering down Castiel’s side. “You okay, Cas?”

It’s Castiel that answers him, and only Castiel. “Of course,” he thinks for a minute, breathing in the hollow of Dean’s neck where his collarbone and throat meet. “Dean.”

He likes Dean’s voice better.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading.


End file.
